Free Saturn Rukh by Robert L. Forward Page B

bare back. Like to try it?”
     
    For a long time, Dan considered the proposition. Finally, he gave a sad smile and shook his head. “I’d love to try it, Chass ... but I can’t—”
     
    “I understand,” replied Chastity with a smile. She gave him another kiss—a peck this time—and turned to head up the ladder, zipping up the front of her jumpsuit as she did so. She slept alone that night, just as Dan had done every night for the past year.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    They were scheduled to arrive at Saturn exactly one year after they had left Earth’s orbit. The Earth would be back around in its orbit to the point where they had taken off, so the distance to Earth was ten AU. A week before that date, Chastity was at the pilot console, watching the string of numbers that indicated the acceleration and velocity of Sexdent with respect to the Sun and Saturn.
     
    “There it goes…” she murmured quietly to herself.
     
    “There goes what?” asked Pete, who was floating around the upper deck sipping a squeezer of coffee.
     
    “The acceleration went through zero,” replied Chastity. “We left Earth going nearly fifty-six klecs. Ever since we left, our acceleration has been negative because of the pull of the Sun, and we have been slowing down as we climbed up out of the Sun’s gravity well. We’re now at thirty-nine klecs. But we just passed over the point between the Sun and Saturn where the gravity influence of Saturn takes over. Our acceleration is now positive as we fall into Saturn’s gravity well and we’re speeding up again. We should be there in about a week.”
     
    Pete came over behind Chastity and looked over her shoulder out the viewport above her console. Saturn was no longer just an orange dot with “handles.” It had grown until it was half as big as the Sun or Luna in the skies of Earth. The rings were nearly broadside toward the Sun and the northern hemisphere of the yellow-orange planet was fully illuminated, for it was “summer” on Saturn.
     
    “How fast will we be going when we get there?” asked Pete, curious.
     
    “Since we’re on a fast-passage track rather than a Hohmann transfer orbit, we’ll be coming at it at almost right angles to its orbital velocity,” said Chastity. “We’ll be meeting it going over forty klecs, and by the time we build up speed diving in over the rings, we’ll be going almost fifty-four klecs. Once again we’ll be the fastest spacecraft in the solar system.”
     
    ~ * ~
     
    The next morning, Pete was the last one out of the crew habitats.
     
    “This free fall really feels good after all those gees,” he said, as he pulled himself down the ladder and joined the rest of the crew for breakfast.
     
    “Enjoy it while you can,” said Rod. “Once we get down into Saturn, it’ll be one gee all the time.”
     
    “Not quite one gee,” Sandra reminded him. “Because Saturn is rotating so rapidly, the centrifugal force at the equator cancels out a portion of the gravity, so it’s only ninety-three percent of one gee there, although it gets up to a hundred and twenty percent of Earth gravity at the pole.”
     
    “Any percent of gravity is too much,” complained Pete. “Especially if you have to exercise in it.”
     
    “That’s one thing you won’t have to do,” interjected Dan. “We can forget about the compulsory exercise period once we are on Saturn. We’ll get enough exercise just going up and down the ladder while we’re getting our day’s work done. It’ll be just like living on the Earth. That six months we’re going to spend down there at Earth-normal is just what the doctor ordered for your bones and cardiovascular system.”
     
    “It is going to be a lot like living on Earth, isn’t it,” said Sandra. “To find the lifeforms, we’ll have to go down to the water cloud level. Then, both the gravity and the temperature will be Earth-surface normal.”
     
    “Like Earth on a cloudy night,” reminded Chastity, “there